Gigabyte G5 Gaming Laptop Review – Aesthetically Pleasing, But Loud

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Are Gaming Laptops a Solid Option in Today’s Market?

Around five or six years ago gaming laptops were not great options in the PC gaming space. Hardware wasn’t quite at the same performance level that it is today, and these all-in-one systems were much more expensive in comparison, weakening the value-proposition considerably versus a desktop PC or even a prebuilt. If we fast forward to today, I’d argue that laptops are a significantly better option for consumers that want to avoid building their own PC, or need a more portable setup.

But this is entirely dependent on the laptop that you pick, and the price of the laptop. Although there are a number of great laptops out there, there are also a multitude of laptops that we would recommend avoiding due to weaker component choices, or because the price isn’t worth what’s on offer. And this is the biggest takeaway that we’d recommend consumers consider when picking up a laptop. Obviously use-case, and budget also play into this consideration, but make sure you always pick up a laptop that is better or similarly priced to what you’d have to pay if you were building a desktop machine.

Looping back to the question that we’ve asked, I’d argue that gaming laptops are a solid option. You get the bonus of portability, and an all-in-one system that is fully assembled and requires very little effort to setup beyond logging into a few things. Although there are clear limitations to a laptop if you can pick one up for a reasonable price you’ll be able to play all of your favourite games at solid framerates.

Gigabyte G5 Design & Aesthetics

Upon opening up the box for the Gigabyte G5, I was pleasantly surprised by how small the G5 is. The size of the chassis makes this laptop small enough to easily fit in a big, which also makes it perfect for transporting. In terms of weight, the G5 sits around the 1.9Kg mark, so it is a little bit hefty, but this weight will disappear if you’ve put it into a messenger bag or rucksack. Opening up the laptop you’re greeted with a 144Hz, 15 inch screen. It is a little bit disappointing that the screen is so small, but ultimately with the size of this laptop, there are limitations to how big the screen can be without running into weight problems.

Moving down a bit, the G5 offers a chiclet style full-size keyboard that includes a numpad. So for all of you strategy and simulation gamers out there, this laptop is perfect. The keyboard does offer RGB backlighting of which you can choose between 15 pre-set colours. It is a bit saddening that this isn’t per-key programmable, but I can’t argue with this that much based on the price. I’m personally not a fan of the chiclet style keys as they feel very weightless, but I will admit that this keyboard was effectively silent, so I imagine this wouldn’t annoy anyone if you’re on the train or bus, typing away.

The touchpad feels very responsive. Double-finger scrolling, or tapping to activate applications was very quick, and I’m a big fan of the overall responsiveness. As for the rest of the aesthetic, Gigabyte have definitely taken a stealthy approach here. The all-black chassis does look quite sophisticated, but there are areas of gloss that I would rather be matte to avoid any finger prints, or sweat marks from an intense session of gaming. But besides this, the overall design is solid. I do think Gigabyte need to integrate an easier way to turn off the RGB backlights, but ignoring this, the darker aesthetic is quite a nice look.

Key Specs and Features

In this section we’ll be taking a look at the key specs and principal features of the Gigabyte G5 Laptop, followed by some performance metrics. This laptop is loaded to the brim with some great features and powerful components, so we’ve broken all of the standout ones below.

Gigabyte G5 Specs

Features

Excellent 1080p 144Hz Display

Gigabyte’s G5 Gaming Laptop sports a 1080p, 144Hz, 15-inch monitor designed for gaming. If you’re the kind of consumer looking for a buttery smooth display experience, the G5 will not disappoint. This vibrant screen is perfect for some competitive gaming, minimising any stutters or artifacts on screen.

Super Responsive Touchpad

I’ve briefly mentioned this in the design section of this article, but it is worth touching on in the features section. The touchpad on the G5 is super responsive and I’d even go a step further to say that it’s a solid option for gaming. Laptop touchpads are often slow and sluggish, but I genuinely felt that the touchpad was almost tuned to respond much quicker. Although this is a smaller feature, I’d argue it’s one of the more important ones based on the fact that you’ll be using the touchpad very often.

Solid Workstation Performance

Although the Core i5 12500H isn’t the most powerful 12th-Gen CPU, but it still offers great performance for a multifaceted system. The 12 cores and 16 threads should give you enough legroom to handle a variety of workstation-based applications.

Decent Speaker Setup

Gigabyte‘s G5 offers a pretty solid speaker setup for those that haven’t purchased headphones or a headset. This laptop is equipped with DTS:X Ultra audio, offering solid quality even under a little bit more stress. Although these speakers won’t be able to provide insane quality comparative to a soundbar or cinema setup, I’d say that the sound quality is good enough that you can enjoy a gaming session without any scratchy noises.

Modern IO Options

The G5 Gaming Laptop offers a good set of rear IO, allowing you to easily plug in accessories and peripherals for a full gaming setup. In terms of USB ports, consumers have access to two Type-C USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, a Type-A USB 3.2 Gen1 port, and a USB 2.0 option. For those with extra displays, you can choose from Mini DP 1.4, or HDMI with HDCP. There’s also 1 Gigabit LAN for those that prefer a stable internet connection, or WiFi 6E, providing insanely high speeds.

Gaming Performance Benchmarks

Now we’ll be delving into the most important section of this article – the benchmarks. The Gigabyte G5 gaming laptop has been put through the wringer with a plethora of gaming benchmarks, designed to determine how this laptop handles modern triple A titles, along with popular Esports games in a variety of different settings. All of our full runs are located on our component benchmarking channel – Benched. There you’ll find a plethora of components being tested in a myriad of popular games.

Cyberpunk 2077

First off in Cyberpunk 2077, we ran two different benchmarks. One had DLSS Frame Generation and Ray-Tracing enabled, and the other was set to High settings with nothing extra turned on. Unfortunately, in both of these benchmarks we saw some pretty poor performance across both runs. During the DLSS benchmark, framerates were all over the place. The laptop fans spun up and were extremely loud in an attempt to keep the system cool, which I imagine was probably causing some thermal throttling, as temperatures were quite high too.

It was difficult to ascertain an average framerate in both of these benchmarks because there were so many drops and points where we’d see stutters. We did get consistent 60FPS a couple of times, but this was then followed up by more frame drops and stuttering. I would have chalked this up to Ray-Tracing, but with all of the extra settings turned off, the game was still stuttering, which doesn’t bode well for other games, but this could just be a Cyberpunk problem, which wouldn’t surprise me.

Spiderman Miles Morales

In Spiderman Miles Morales performance did take a bit of a dive here too. We figured that framerates would be better with a lack of Ray-Tracing but even with Frame Generation enabled we were definitely expecting better. During our Frame Gen benchmark we were able to consistently reach around 60FPS which is playable. However, we experienced quite a few drops during areas of intensity that let this benchmark down. Frame Generation clearly isn’t able to hold the RTX 4060’s hand here, which is resulting in much weaker performance.

As you can expect, the standard 1080p high benchmark wasn’t much better. Framerates were somewhat similar with 60FPS being a far less consistent target, and frame drops happening here and there. Again, I’d argue that this game is playable, but we were just expecting better performance overall from an RTX 4000 card. This clearly isn’t the GPU to be playing modern games with.

Conclusion